Is Korea University's Rise the Result of a THES Error?

It looks as though the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) world university rankings will soon claim another victim. The president of Yonsei University, Republic of Korea, Jung Chang-young, has been criticised by his faculty. According to the Korea Times:

The school has been downgraded on recent college evaluation charts, and Jung has
been held responsible for the downturn.

Associations of professors and alumni, as well as many students, are questioning the president’s leadership. Jung’s poor results on the survey were highlighted by the school’s rival, Korea University, steadily climbing the global education ranks.
When Jung took the position in 2004, he stressed the importance of the international competitiveness of the university. “Domestic college ranking is meaningless, and
I will foster the school as a world-renowned university,” he said during his
inauguration speech.

However, the school has moved in the other direction. Yonsei University ranked behind Korea University in this year’s JoongAng Daily September college evaluation for the first time since 1994. While its rival university saw its global rank jump from 184th last year to 150th this year, Yonsei University failed to have its name listed among the world’s top 200 universities in the ranking by the London based The Times.

It is rather interesting that Yonsei university has been ahead of Korea University (KU) between 1995 and 2005 on a local evaluation while lagging far behind on the THES rankings in 2005 and 2006. In 2005 Korea was 184th in the THES rankings while Yonsei was 467th. This year Korea University was 150th and Yonsei 486th.

It is also strange that Yonsei does quite a bit a better than KU on most parts of the Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings. Both get zero for alumni and awards but Yonsei does better on highly cited researchers (7.7 and 0), articles in Nature and Science (8.7 and 1.5), and Science Citation Index (46.4 and 42.6) , while being slightly behind on size (16 and 16.6) Overall, Yonsei is in the 201-300 band and KU in the 301-400.

So why has KU done so well on the THES rankings while Yonsei is languishing almost at the bottom? It is not because of research. KU gets a score of precisely 1 in both 2005 and 2006 and, anyway, Yonsei does better for research on the Shanghai index. One obvious contribution to KU’s outstanding performance is the faculty- student ratio. KU had a score of 15 on this measure in 2005 and of 55 in 2006, when the top scoring university is supposedly Duke with a ratio of 3.48 .

According to QS Quacquarelli Symonds, the consultants who prepared the data for THES, Korea University has 4,407 faculty and 28,042 students, giving a ratio of 6.36.

There is something very odd about this. Just last month the president of KU said that his university had 28 students per faculty and was trying had to get the ratio down to 12 students per faculty. Didn’t he know that, according to THES and QS, KU had done that already?

President Euh also noted that in order for Korean universities to provide better
education and stand higher among the world universities' ranking, the
faculty-student ratio should improve from the current 1: 28 (in the case of
Korea University) to 1: 12, the level of other OECD member nations. He insisted
that in order for this to be realized, government support for overall higher
education should be increased from the current level of 0.5% of GNP to 1% of GNP
to be in line with other OECD nations.

It is very unlikely that the president of KU has made a mistake. The World of Learning 2003 indicates that KU had 21, 685 students and 627 full time teachers. That gives us a ratio of 1: 35. suggesting that KU has been making steady progress in this respect over the last few years.
How then did QS arrive at the remarkable ratio of 6.36? I could not find any data on the KU web site. The number of students on the QS site, however, seems reasonable, suggesting a substantial but plausible increase over the last few years but 4,407 faculty seems quite unrealistic. Where did this figure come from? Whatever the answer, it is quite clear that KU‘s faculty-student score is grossly inflated and so therefore is it’s total score. If Duke had a score of 100 and a ratio of 3.48 (see archives) then KU’s score for faculty-student ratio should have been, by my calculation, 12 and not 55. Therefore its overall score, after calibrating against top scoring Harvard’s, would have been 20.3 and not 32.2. This would have left KU well outside the top 200.

Incidentally, Yonsei’s faculty student ratio, according to QS and its own web site, is 34.25, quite close to KU's self-admitted ratio.

It appears that the criticism directed at Yonsei’s president is perhaps misplaced since KU’s position in the rankings is the result of a QS error. Without that error, Yonsei might have been ahead of KU or at least not too far behind.